§ Statement of Purpose

The View from 1776 presents a framework to understand present-day issues from the viewpoint of the colonists who fought for American independence in 1776 and wrote the Constitution in 1787. Knowing and preserving those understandings, what might be called the unwritten constitution of our nation, is vital to preserving constitutional government. Without them, the bare words of the Constitution are just a Rorschach ink-blot that politicians, educators, and judges can interpret to mean anything they wish.

"We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams, to the Officers of the First Brigade, Third Division, Massachusetts Militia, October 11, 1798.

§ American Traditions

§ People and Ideas

§ Decline of Western Civilization: a Snapshot

§ Books to Read

§ BUY MY BOOK

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

First Do No Harm

Who does more real, assessable harm to students? An Imus, or the liberals who loved to be featured guests on his radio program? The secular education of atheistic, materialistic liberalism is akin to physicians prescribing arsenic instead of vitamins.

Steve Kellmeyer has an interesting perspective on the media farrago over Don Imus’s remarks and his firing.

The Best of Racists
By Steve Kellmeyer

Don Imus has been in the news lately. His remarks about a women’s college basketball team have been correctly attacked as racist, he has lost his job, he has been, dare I use the term, blacklisted.

Now, while no one has endorsed what he said, neither has anyone asserted that his remarks actually caused real or lasting damage to anyone. No one on the basketball team is alleging that the remarks have made it impossible for her to play or complete her college classes. No one is alleging fiscal or emotional harm.

But what if Imus’s remarks had caused lasting harm? What if the derogatory statements caused so much turmoil that it actually reduced the team’s ability to play basketball, or reduced the players’ ability to complete their education?

What would we do if we discovered that engaging in certain kinds of conversation actually harmed the young lads and ladies who were taught that conversational style? Conversely, what would we do if we discovered that engaging in certain kinds of conversation actually improved the lives of the young men and women who engaged in it?

Well, that’s a rhetorical question. You see, we know what kinds of conversation harm people and what kinds help people, so we promote the ones that damage them and denigrate the ones that assist them.

According to William Jeynes, professor of education at California State University, Long Beach, examination of data gathered in the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS) demonstrates that “Religious faith and intact and stable family units are two resources that enable youth of color to achieve at the same levels of white students.”

He found that the quality of the school has essentially no effect on learning ability. Rather, the driving forces were family stability and religious fervor. The more religiously active the family, the higher the academic scores. The entire academic “race gap” can be explained in terms of religion and family structure.

Indeed, highly religious minority students actually outperformed the aggregate of white students in certain academic areas, such as their desire to take college placement courses and their likelihood in being left behind a grade in school.

Viewed in this light, we can see that atheism is simply a form of racism.

This is actually not surprising. Atheists tend to be eugenicists, which is to say, they tend to be racists. Christians do not wish to “breed a race of thoroughbreds,” as Margaret Sanger urged. American Christians may have enslaved blacks, but English Christians, and subsequently American Christians, were also at the forefront of the abolition movement. Catholic Christianity invented the orphanage, the university and largely invented the hospital. Because Christians who live Christian Faith care for the well-being of every man, Christians improve every man.

Contrast this to the atheists, who simply write off large segments of humanity as insufficiently well-endowed by genes or circumstance, unworthy of the social resources necessary to maintain them.

For a logically consistent atheist, altruism enables mediocrity. There are people whose best will never even approach adequacy; investing resources into these people is a dead loss from an atheistic economic perspective.

The Christian economy of value strenuously denies this. Every person has intrinsic worth because God, who alone knows the value of all things, has loved that person into existence and continues to love and maintain that person in existence for all eternity. The widow’s mite is worth more than the whole treasury of the Temple. The best that the least among us produce is worth more than anything the intellectual elite can manufacture.

Therein lies the source of the problem: the intellectual elites instinctively know this. Just as a bully harasses his victims as a way of denying his own inadequacies, so the elites harass religious belief precisely because it completes what they cannot complete.

Insofar as the intellectual elites insist on destroying students’ faith, they destroy students’ futures. But it is better that other human lives be destroyed than that any atheist be forced to face his own weakness or be forced to acknowledge a power greater than himself.

America’s elites natter on about racism, they project racism onto everyone they encounter, because they are racists. They are too narrow-minded to believe that other people may not think as they do, may not value the same things they value.

To a mind that cannot see beyond the skin, the greatest danger is the minds that can see beyond skin, the persons who can see the image of the living God dwelling within. The schools must be stripped of this knowledge, men and women cannot be allowed to learn these truths, for if they do, society as we know it will be destroyed.